TY - JOUR
AU - Bresnahan,Timothy F.
AU - Brynjolfsson,Erik
AU - Hitt,Lorin M.
TI - Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 7136
PY - 1999
Y2 - May 1999
DO - 10.3386/w7136
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7136
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7136.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Timothy F. Bresnahan
SIEPR
Landau Economics Building, Room 325
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: 650/723-9471
E-Mail: tbres@stanford.edu
Erik Brynjolfsson
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-414
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/253-4319
E-Mail: erikb@mit.edu
AB - Recently, the relative demand for skilled labor has increased dramatically. We investigate one of the causes, skill-biased technical change. Advances in information technology (IT) are among the most powerful forces bearing on the economy. Employers who use IT often make complementary innovations in their organizations and in the services they offer. Our hypothesis is that these co-inventions by IT users change the mix of skills that employers demand. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that it is a cluster of complementary changes involving IT, workplace organization and services that is the key skill-biased technical change. We examine new firm-level data linking several indicators of IT use, workplace organization, and the demand for skilled labor. In both a short-run factor demand framework and a production function framework, we find evidence for complementarity. IT use is complementary to a new workplace organization which includes broader job responsibilities for line workers, more decentralized decision-making, and more self-managing teams. In turn, both IT and that new organization are complements with worker skill, measured in a variety of ways. Further, the managers in our survey believe that IT increases skill requirements and autonomy among workers in their firms. Taken together, the results highlight the roles of both IT and IT-enabled organizational change as important components of the skill-biased technical change.
ER -